Moved from pseudoscience, and focused predominantly on terrible diets backed up with bad science, which are endorsed by celebrities ~~Felstaff

Blood-Type Diet.Essentially, your blood type dictates what you eat. So if you are O, you should have "high meat intake and no dairy, wheat or grains" ...which leaves out a whole load of nutrients, so essentially you are enforcing deficiency of everything they advertise along the top of a Cheeri-O's box.

The list:1. A – No dairy products allowed and a vegetarian-based diet.2. B – A more varied intake of food and the only blood group able to ‘manage’ dairy products.3. AB – Combination of diets A and B (Yes or no to dairy?)4. O – High meat intake, no dairy, no wheat, no grains (think Atkins).

Pseudoscience part: "Prepare to be blinded by science! Dr D’Adamo [the creator of the diet] believes our blood group determines how our bodies deal with different nutrients. His theory is based on the idea that each blood group has its own unique antigen marker (a substance that the body recognises as being alien) and this marker reacts badly with certain foods, leading to all sorts of potential health problems. Furthermore, Dr D’Adamo believes that levels of stomach acidity and digestive enzymes are linked with your blood type. Consequently, he says, by following a diet designed specifically for your blood type, your body digests and absorbs food more efficiently, with the result that you lose weight.

But here’s where the theory becomes even more weird and wonderful. Dr D’Adamo believes that because blood types evolved at different times throughout history, we should eat a diet based on the types of foods our ancestors typically ate at the time when our blood type was first recognised!"[1]

The Maple Syrup/Lemonade/Master Cleanse DietLemons + maple syrup + chilli pepper + laxatives - solids = ewww. I think this one came about a belief that, internally, humans are no different to the pipes underneath the kitchen sink, so 'detoxing' with some vile liquid concoction would have the same effect as pouring Drano® down yer plughole.

Cabbage Soup DietThe idea is to lose weight quickly (and dangerously) by eating nothing but cabbage soup, and drinking nothing but water. The pseudoscience part is that proponents say that the cabbage itself "burns fat" i.e. the calorie content is so negligible, you use more energy digesting it than the soup contains. I wonder if this is true...

Dukan DietHideously complex 4-stage protein-based diet. You start off eating nothing but protein for god knows how long, then have a protein + vegetable stage, then a protein + vegetable + carb stage, then a eat-everything-but-save-Thursdays-for-"protein day"-for-the-rest-of-your-life stage.

The pseudoscience bit: "Our size, says Dr Dukan, is largely determined by the number of fat cells (called adipocytes) we are born with. The more you have, the greater your capacity to gain weight (women, unfortunately, usually have more than men). The problem is, when you eat badly or too much and gain weight, your adipocytes put on weight too, becoming distended. If this continues, the adipocytes ‘hypertrophy’, or enlarge, and eventually reach the limit of their elasticity. At this critical moment, if you continue to live unhealthily, each adipocyte cell will divide into two daughter cells, doubling your body’s capacity to make and store fat."

So, er, your fat cells stretch to breaking point, then split and become two fat cells, thereby doubling the amount of fat your body is capable of storing. (This has been disproved, or, more specifically, proved as "absolute twaddle")

I think dieting and nutrition is rife with pseudoscience, because it's the easiest way to explain away crash/fad dieting without resorting to the old "eat sensibly, move more" thing which, frankly, takes far too much effort.

And it's nothing new-the creators of breakfast cereal were both (Kellogg and Post) fans of insane diets. Of course, at the period in which they were indulging themselves the connection between diet and conditions like diabetes was just becoming clear, vitamins were being discovered and so on. These days we have thrown over the man in the white lab coat for the face on the screen-no matter how idiotic they are.

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a puffer fish.

Felstaff wrote:Cabbage Soup DietThe idea is to lose weight quickly (and dangerously) by eating nothing but cabbage soup, and drinking nothing but water. The pseudoscience part is that proponents say that the cabbage itself "burns fat" i.e. the calorie content is so negligible, you use more energy digesting it than the soup contains. I wonder if this is true...

Unfortunately, there really aren't "negative calorie" foods unless the food actually has zero calories to begin with and then requires some caloric expenditure during digestion. Digestion requires only tiny amounts of energy to accomplish so any caloric content in food is most likely going to be somewhat greater than the energy of the muscle contractions and what-not involved with mixing and moving the food through the GI tract.

PAstrychef wrote:These days we have thrown over the man in the white lab coat for the face on the screen-no matter how idiotic they are.

And why not? What people mostly see from the lab coats changes every few years, too; and it's often not the easiest to separate which is research for the sake of finding useful information, and which is bought and paid for. The desire for quick and easy solutions, and easy to process sound bites, does not lend itself to quality information.

DSenette: (...) on the whole, even a trained killer cow is kind of stupid.

Felstaff wrote:Moved from pseudoscience, and focused predominantly on terrible diets backed up with bad science, which are endorsed by celebrities ~~FelstaffThe Maple Syrup/Lemonade/Master Cleanse DietLemons + maple syrup + chilli pepper + laxatives - solids = ewww. I think this one came about a belief that, internally, humans are no different to the pipes underneath the kitchen sink, so 'detoxing' with some vile liquid concoction would have the same effect as pouring Drano® down yer plughole.

My mom does this as a colon cleanse for 3-4 days at a time, minus the laxatives. It's actually REALLY good for that, but clebs have gone into starvation mode using it for more than that. It's super unhealthy for long term periods.

I never understand "cleanse" diets. Juice cleanses, "detox" things, colon cleanses.Your body is designed to eliminate toxins and non-useful things in a variety of ways. You don't have to mess with it in a bizarre way to be cleansed. You just eat healthy food and drink enough water.

PictureSarah wrote:I never understand "cleanse" diets. Juice cleanses, "detox" things, colon cleanses.Your body is designed to eliminate toxins and non-useful things in a variety of ways. You don't have to mess with it in a bizarre way to be cleansed. You just eat healthy food and drink enough water.

People who need to detox are people who put really awful shit in their bodies. Unless your doing drugs, drinking motor oil, or have a serious medical condition this type of purging would be at best not helpful and uncomfortable.

Zamfir wrote:Yeah, that's a good point. Everyone is all about presumption of innocence in rape threads. But when Mexican drug lords build APCs to carry their henchmen around, we immediately jump to criminal conclusions without hard evidence.

PictureSarah wrote:I never understand "cleanse" diets. Juice cleanses, "detox" things, colon cleanses.Your body is designed to eliminate toxins and non-useful things in a variety of ways. You don't have to mess with it in a bizarre way to be cleansed. You just eat healthy food and drink enough water.

People who need to detox are people who put really awful shit in their bodies. Unless your doing drugs, drinking motor oil, or have a serious medical condition this type of purging would be at best not helpful and uncomfortable.

Or eat nothing but boxed/fast foods, with little to no fiber...which is bad, and extremely common in the US.

I've tried a few cleanse routines, before. They seemed to work, but I got the same results, w/o any side effects, and cheaper, just by eating more oats and barley.

DSenette: (...) on the whole, even a trained killer cow is kind of stupid.

The idea is to lose weight quickly (and dangerously) by eating nothing but cabbage soup, and drinking nothing but water. The pseudoscience part is that proponents say that the cabbage itself "burns fat" i.e. the calorie content is so negligible, you use more energy digesting it than the soup contains. I wonder if this is true